More on Google Earth

I’ve now spent half a day playing with this thing when I should have been working, and it’s left me exploding in wonder.

I think Google Earth might be the last layer of the wired world’s UI. The thing that connects it all together: geography, infrastructure, communications, civilisations, cities, business. I mean, what’s the potential of pay-per-click when you’ve merged in a virtuality of the entire planet? Local communities connected globally, blended seamlessly by one of the few applications that can legitimately demand both bandwidth and processing power. Not searching the Earth’s information, but searching the Earth.

Add real-time, add GPS, and you’ve modelled the whole world. The applications that can roll off it are endless. Weather forecasting. Climate change. City planning. Imagine London’s 500,000 surveillance cameras linked into this thing. It goes far beyond checking if it’s sunny in Surrey; you can see if your favourite restaurant has a table free outside too. So many things are going to be linked together by this, creating new opportunities.

Of course I’ve done the you-can-see-my-house-from-here stuff – living in one of the world’s most densely populated cities, the wealth of detail is awesome. And it changes your perspective – literally. When I stepped out for an hour, I felt I was walking on the surface of the earth, not the streets of a city. Having just slow-flown the walk to the supermarket on my laptop, I then walked the same route at street level, passing the same buildings I’d just zoomed in on from space. Mind-blowing.

And the most magical hour of the day? Tracking down one special place in the USA, without a grid reference, just dead-reckoning along the dusty roads I’ve taken several times from Empire and Gerlach. And when I saw it from 9500ft, after many false trails – I had to search the web for pics taken from the air just to work out which of the mountains it might be near – it made me gasp. Marked by the vague semicircles that form city streets for one magical week each year, the site of Burning Man was plainly visible.